How Google Home answers queries

Google Home is catching up to the Amazon Echo, capturing a solid 40% of the holiday’s sales in 2017. However, there is a lot that we don’t know about how the Google Assistant responds to our questions. According to a recent survey online, there are specific sources for certain queries. As a marketer, taking advantage of the sudden surge in voice searches on Google Assistant will require knowing how you can take advantage of those sources. Here are some of the results of the survey:

Featured Snippet Box

From what we know, Google Home will answer with the results of the featured snippet you see at the top of the search results when you do search on a desktop browser. This is true only to a certain extent. Just because your entry is in the snippet, does not mean that the Assistant will use your answer to the query. Two things can happen if you don’t hear your answer, which is that the Assistant will not give a result, or it will refer to a different result for the answer.

Local

You will need a Google My Business listing to come up with local searches. There is no indication as to how local listings are given an order, but more information will come to light as the number of searches grows.

Categories

Google Home will not use the snippet information for key categories like flights, actions, places, and locations . Instead, Google will rely on its databases for each of those categories.